Why malware is on the rise, and Trojans are your biggest threat

Not worried about malware? Provided you take sensible precautions when on the web, and have decent anti-malware installed, your chances of getting infected are relatively low, but the threat still persists and isn’t to be underestimated.

According to PandaLabs, a total of 20 million new strains were created worldwide in the third quarter of 2014, which works out to 227,747 new samples being identified every day.

At the same time, more people were infected. PandaLabs says the global infection ratio was 37.93 per cent in Q3, up just over 1 per cent from Q2 (36.87 per cent).

PandaLabs found that Trojans remain the most common form of malware by a long way (78.08 per cent), and were also the source of most infections too - 75 per cent, up from 62.80 per cent in the previous quarter. Viruses are a distant second threat (8.89 per cent), followed by worms in third place (3.92 per cent).

PUPs (Potentially Unwanted Programs) were responsible for 14.55 per cent of all infections, followed by adware/spyware (6.88 per cent), worms (2.09 per cent), and viruses (1.48 per cent).

Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs, says "In these last months we have seen how cyber-crime has continued to grow. Criminals haven’t ceased to create malware in order to infect as many systems as possible so as to access sensitive or confidential information. Corporate environments are also under attack," he added.

"In the last three months many large companies have been drawn into numerous scandals, including the so-called 'Celebgate', where nude photos of actresses and models hosted on Apple’s iCloud service were leaked, or the theft of passwords for Gmail and Dropbox".

Looking at infections globally, PandaLabs found China has the highest infection rates (49.83 per cent), followed by Peru (42.38 per cent) and Bolivia (42.12 per cent). Norway (23.07 per cent) and Sweden (23.44 per cent) have the lowest infection rates, followed by Japan (24.02 per cent).